Chapter XII
Transition to the End of All Philosophy
The love of wisdom is the least that one can possess; wisdom for man the highest —and hence transcendent. Transcendental philosophy is the progression from the latter to the former.
The final end of all knowledge is to know oneself in the highest practical reason. [Kt9:21.155-6]
1. Kant’s Return to Immediate Experience: The Three Transitions
Kant’s Opus Postumum [Kt9], as we saw in Chapter XI, is much more than just a series of jumbled footnotes to or revisions of a transitional argument Kant had insufficiently developed in his earlier works, as Förster claims. Rather, it is Kant’s attempt to complete the architectonic structure of his System. The only way he can do this is to reveal as clearly as possible ‘the idea of the whole’ as a transition that itself consists of multiple transitions.[1] Förster is right, therefore, to recognize the importance of transitional arguments in Kt9, but wrong to limit them to one type. As we shall see in this chapter, Kant discusses at least three distinct types of transition in Kt9. Each in its own way brings us to a point that marks the end—both in the sense of ‘purpose’ or ‘aim’ and in the sense of ‘finishing point’—of philosophy as such. By requiring us to accept a brute fact in silent recognition of its transcendent presence, each transition puts us in touch with the highest expression of Critical mysticism.
After this introductory section, this chapter’s account of the content of Kt9 begins where I believe Kant himself was planning to begin his book: with a discussion of the idea of God as rooted in the categorical imperative, considered as philosophy’s moral end.[2] XII.3 then deals with the idea of the world as rooted in the universal presence of an underlying, unknowable substance, identified by Kant as ‘ether’ or ‘caloric’. This is followed by a discussion in XII.4 of what I believe was Kant’s main goal in Kt9: to show how the presence of human beings in the world serves to unify the otherwise opposing ideas of God and the world. That section concludes both the chapter and this second volume of the Kant’s System of Perspectives series with some reflections on how philosophers can cope with the ‘end’ of philosophy as so announced. It also serves as a transition to KSP3, where the perspectival paradigm will be used to interpret the nature and limits of Kant’s idea of the world and how it gives rise to the metaphysics of science.
Kant’s critics in the last decade of his life presented him with what is still often regarded as the most difficult problem raised by his theory of knowledge in Kt1: is the object that affects us in the experience of sense-perception an empirical object or is it the thing in itself? Kant-interpreters then and ever since have tended to divide themselves into three camps based on their response to this issue:[3] (1) the phenomenalism or idealism of contemporaries such as Maimon, Fichte, and J.S. Beck, later defended by the ‘Marburg’ school, regarded only phenomenal affection as valid; (2) the noumenalism of contemporaries such as J. Schulze, later defended by the ‘Heidelberg’ school, regarded only noumenal affection as valid; and (3) later interpreters such as Vaihinger and Adickes regarded both as valid, and therefore devised the infamous theory of ‘double affection’ as an interpretation of Kant’s view [Ad20:18; q.i. Ke23: 612-3].
What has never been fully appreciated is that Kant himself was developing his own answer in Kt9, an answer that follows a fourth way: considered from the perspective of our immediate experience of the sense-object, neither the thing in itself nor the empirical object affects us, for this very distinction arises only from reflection on such immediate experience. Kant’s answer to the question, in other words, is to say that in immediate experience the object (under whatever name it assumes, whether Self, God, Sense-Object, Reason, etc.) affects itself. ‘The first act of reason is consciousness’ [Kt9:21.105], and out of this initial act all reflective perspectives eventually arise. From the transcendental perspective the thing in itself must be posited as the source of the material of perception; from the empirical perspective the empirical object must be so regarded; but in our pre-perspectival immediate experience, neither of these provides an accurate explanation. Kt9 can be interpreted properly only if we recognize Kant’s intention to counter the various diverging tendencies with a truly Critical answer to this question. That he is no longer starting with the transcendental object (i.e., with ‘experience in general’), but is showing how it arises out of experience in particular (i.e., immediate experience), is clear when he says: ‘The first act of thinking contains a principle of ... the self-affecting subject in a system of ideas which contain merely the formal [factors] of the advance [from particular experience] to experience in general.’[4]
Kt9’s single, all-encompassing principle, serving as a vortex that everything else flows into, is expressed in a variety of ways—e.g., as ‘Self’, ‘God’, ‘Nature’ (the ‘Sense-Object’), or ‘Morally-Practical Reason’—but its most fundamental characteristic is always the same: self-creativity. This ‘one principle’ of Zoroaster, repeatedly mentioned in Kt9, is sometimes associated with Spinoza’s ‘principle of intuiting all things in God’. As we saw in X.4, Kant showed interest in this principle as early as 1770 [Kt19:410]; now he continues to toy with it, reformulating it as ‘the capacity of thought as inner intuition to develop out of itself’ [Ad20:730, q.i. Ke23:640; s.a. Kt9:21.15]—i.e., as the capacity for self-transcendence that alone gives rise to knowledge.[5] Kant explains in Kt9:21.152 that God should be represented ‘not as a being in the world but [as] the pure idea of self-constitution, similar to the pure intelligence of the subject itself.—The highest intelligence.’[6] Similarly, he says ‘I am an object of myself and of my representations. That there is something else outside me is my own product. I make myself.... We make everything ourselves.’[7] When Kant talks in this way about self-creativity, we must keep in mind that he is no longer assuming a reflective perspective of any sort, but is attempting to speak about the unspeakable (i.e., immediate experience) and its relation to the standpoints and perspectives adopted throughout his entire System. From this new ‘standpoint’ no distinctions can be made at all: everything is One. Even the distinction between reality and appearance breaks down. The immediate experience of the Self is all there is. As we shall see, the only way to speak about the unspeakable is to use apparent contradictions (e.g., in the form A = -A), such as ‘the object [or thing in itself] is the subject’ [e.g., 22.414-5(181)] or ‘Synthetic and analytic’ [22.88(193); cf. Pa00a:78-85].
The common assumption that Kant thought this spontaneous and ‘self-creative character’ belongs to ‘the noumenal self’ [Ke23:627; s.a. Wa72:163] can now be seen to be entirely incorrect. The noumenal self is a construction arising out of our human consciousness as a ‘world-being’, or ‘being-in-the-world’ (Weltwessen),[8] and only the latter can be said to be self-creative. For Kant, immediate experience is therefore not a mystical intuition (at least, not one that can give rise to empirical knowledge), not a noumenal ‘act’, not an action subjected to moral laws, and not a subjective feeling; it is what gives rise to all of these—the nonreflective, undetermined, raw material we use to construct various types of reflective experience. It is the ‘birth’ of reason itself, through which the essential self-creative nature of God is expressed: ‘The concept of [God] is not that of substance—i.e., of a being which exists independent of my thought—but the idea (one’s own creation ...) of a reason which constitutes itself into a thought-object [an ‘ideal’]’ [Kt9:21.27(231)]. This self-creative core of human nature can be regarded as the source of all perspectives and of every element in Kant’s entire System of Perspectives.
The sharp distinction in systemt between the transcendent material of a knowable object (i.e., the unknowable thing in itself) and the formal unity imposed by the transcendental (not noumenal) subject (i.e., by the ‘I’ of apperception) is valid only from the theoretical standpoint. But if we take our starting point not from rational faith in the thing in itself, as posited by transcendental reflection, but from our own undifferentiated immediate experience (the human individual as a world-being), then all such distinctions must be regarded as derivative. From this standpoint of immediacy Kant is therefore able to say that the self posits both itself and its object, and in so doing provides the means for avoiding solipsism: by establishing the potential reflective perspectives, it arises out of the nonreflective ignorance (mystics sometimes call it the knowing ignorance) of immediate experience. This is done by dividing the sense-object into subjective and objective components: ‘The thing in itself is not another object, but another mode of making oneself into an object’ [Kt9:22.415(181)]. But in immediate experience the thing in itself and the subject are not yet distinguished, for ‘the thing in itself is the subject which I make into the object’ [s.a. 22.43-4(178-9)].
Such comments do not imply that Kant has abandoned the unknowable ‘transcendental absolute’ in favor of ‘the absolute of autonomous thought’, as Vleeschauwer suggests [Vl62:189], but only that he recognizes that the former gives way to the latter when transcendental Critique gives way to metaphysics, where autonomous thought is recognized as absolute only because the transcendent absolute is immanent in immediate experience. That Kant has not abandoned the thing in itself to Fichte and the idealists, but has merely changed his standpoint, is evident from the fact that he affirms the Critical doctrine at numerous points in Kt9.[9] When he says ‘transcendental philosophy is an idealism: namely that the subject constitutes itself’ [21.85], he is not denying the objective reality of the phenomenal world, as established in systemt and as presupposed throughout all the nontheological sections of Kt9;[10] rather, he is attempting to describe the prereflective source of the very distinction between phenomenon and noumenon. This is why he says in Kt9:21.552(81) that ‘idealism ... belongs to another branch of philosophy, with which we are not here concerned’—i.e., idealism belongs to critique, whereas Kt9 belongs to metaphysics [see KSP1:III.4]. Because Kt9 also belongs to systemj, ‘the distinction between transcendental and metaphysical finally collapses’ [Fö89:298].
This original act of self-creative and self-legislative reason is what first produces the Kantian ideas of reason: God, the world (and freedom from it), and humanity (with an immortal destiny).[11] Our immediate consciousness of human duties gives rise to the idea of God; our immediate consciousness of sense-objects gives rise to the idea of the world; and our immediate experience of our own self, as a self-creative sense-object, gives rise to the idea of the human person as an immortal ‘being-in-the-world’.[12] This initial synthetic act thus establishes the framework for the reflective perspectives that pattern Kant’s philosophical System: the world (-) is opposed to God (+) just as systemt is to systemp; and the former pair is synthesized by the human person (x), just as systemj synthesizes the latter pair.[13] By revising the content of Figure VI.1 in terms of these correlations, we can present the relationship between Kt9’s three ideas, the ideas as introduced in Kt1 (shown in brackets inside the triangle), and their origin in different types of immediate experience, as follows:
Figure XII.1:
The Original Synthesis of Ideas in Immediate Experience
Within the framework established by these ideas, Kant hopes in Kt9 to construct a ‘complete system of the possibility of the absolute whole of experience, the ‘grounding’ of which ‘by means of the a priori principle of the possibility of experience in general’ was the purpose of the Critical, or ‘Transcendental’ wing of his System.[14] The properly metaphysical wing having already been elaborated in its application to natural science (Kt3) and morality (Kt6), all that remains for Kt9 is the task of unifying these in a final metaphysical system of immediate experience. In systemt, as well as in the other Critical systems, the ideas function primarily as regulative concepts, but here in Kt9 they ‘are not mere concepts but laws of thinking which the subject prescribes itself’ [21.93]. They ‘give the subject-matter [der Stoff] for synthetic a priori laws by means of concepts, and so not merely do they go forth from metaphysics, they even ground the transcendental-philosophy’ [21.20].
This sharp opposition between the ideas of God and the world (or nature) is presupposed throughout all of Kant’s writings. Yet the two ideas are often used ambiguously, making it unclear ‘whether Kant, in phrases like “the intelligible substratum” is talking about God or about the world in itself’ [Bu82:91n]. Thus Dister argues that Kant confuses the cosmological and theological ideas in Kt1 by portraying both as ‘the source of purposiveness in the world’ [Di72:269n; see e.g., Kt1:727]. Kant seems, however, to have viewed God and nature as two sides of the same coin (the coin of ‘totality’): ‘God is a kind of mirror image of the “intelligible substratum” of the world’ [Bu82:91; cf. Go71:66-7]. Kant often talks about nature’s ‘will’ in much the same way as he talks about God’s will [e.g., Kt32:365,367]. Despland discusses the close relationship between God and nature in the form of ‘Providence’: especially in his writings on the philosophy of history, Kant develops the notion of ‘a Nature which is Providence, the mother of mankind, the mainspring of progress, and the guarantee of order’ [De73:7; s.a. 57,73, 90-5,274]. ‘Kant attributed no moral indifference to this Nature. Its purposes are normally wise and they are good for us men’ [47]. Despland quotes George Vlachos’ apt comment that for Kant ‘freedom does not rise over against nature but is born in nature’ [q.i. 48]. Although the interpenetration of God and nature is not always clear in Kant’s theoretical and practical works, his intention to establish such a position becomes more clear in those works that assume the judicial standpoint. And in Kt9 more than any of the others, Kant attempts to work out the details of this interpenetration.
At an early stage in Kt9[15] Kant distinguishes between three types of transition that will occupy his attention in this final work. Specifying the book(s) in Kant’s System that correspond to each type, we can summarize them as follows: from Kt3 to physics; from physics to Kt1 (assuming that by ‘transcendental philosophy’ Kant is referring to its Critical foundation); and from Kt1 to both Kt3 and Kt6 (‘the system of nature and freedom’). These three transitions, taken together, give rise to what Kant calls ‘cosmotheology’: ‘the universal connection of the living forces of all things in reciprocal relation: God and the world.’ In the latter case Kant is taking ‘God and the world’ as one idea [Kt9: 21.19(205)], whose unity constitutes ‘[t]he highest standpoint of transcendental philosophy’ [21.23(206)]. That Kant regards his investigation of these transitions as a part of his third, judicial system, with its more teleological and empirical orientation, is evident from comments such as that his goal will be to construct ‘a world-system (according to purposes)’ [22.193(53), e.a.], based on a ‘schematism of the faculty of judgment for the moving forces of matter’ [21.291(Co60b:381), e.a.] that enables us to anticipate ‘the empirical investigation of Nature’.[16] If Kt9 were meant to be part of the theoretical wing of Kant’s System, and hence to adopt the standpoint of Kt1-Kt3 rather than that of Kt7 and Kt8, then its world-system would surely be mechanical, not purpose-driven.
In what follows I shall demonstrate how the paradoxes referred to as ‘transitions’ in Kt9 can each be resolved and/or explained most clearly by interpreting their epistemological status in terms of analytic a posteriority. This will serve not only to provide us with a much-needed ‘idea of the whole’ for interpreting Kt9, but also to confirm the conjecture made in KSP1:III.4, that Kt9 is the final, synthetic step in Kant’s third (‘judicial’) system and as such occupies the ‘doctrinal’ position corresponding to the analytic a posteriori [cf. Figs. III.9(c) and IV.2 in KSP1]. As Kant puts it in Kt9:21.478(42), ‘the transition from metaphysics to physics’ moves ‘from ... the concept of a matter in general’, which as pure concept would properly be regarded as analytic, ‘to the system of moving forces’, including various ‘empirical principles’ [21.482(43); s.a. 22.141(47)] that can be known only a posteriori. As we shall see, Kant’s analysis of the resulting ‘system of the universal doctrine of forces’—like that of the doctrinal systems proposed in Kt3 and Kt6—would have been much more clear had he identified the doctrine’s status as analytic a posteriori.
2. God: The Categorical Imperative as Philosophy’s Moral End
The main focus of Kant’s attention in the sections of Kt9 dealing with the idea of God (i.e., with the moral aspect of the ‘transition from metaphysics to transcendental philosophy’ [Kt9:22.129(209)]) is on the philosophical implications of the phenomenon we experience as the categorical imperative. Kant repeatedly stresses in these sections [see e.g., 22:104-5(198-9)] the direct or immediate connection between the proposition ‘There is a God’ and our awareness of the categorical imperative. Sometimes he goes far beyond a mere reference to the proposition, as when he says ‘our reason expresses [the moral law] through the divine’ [22.104(198), e.a.] and the idea of God ‘is the feeling of the presence of the divine in man’ [22.18ok]. Elsewhere [e.g., 22.123(205)] he adds: ‘The idea of [the categorical imperative] is that of a substance which ... is not subordinated to a classification of human reason.’ A few paragraphs later he comes right out and calls God ‘a personal substance’ [22.125(206)]. God is ‘the idea of an omnipotent moral being’ who ‘is both all-powerful with regard to nature’ and ‘universally commanding for freedom’; we must regard God not merely as a ‘generic concept’ but as ‘an individual (a thoroughly determined being)’ [22.127-8(207)]—perhaps even ‘a threefold person’ [21.29(232)].
In Wa72:166 Ward expounds Kt9:22.118 to mean ‘God is a Personality, not external to man as a separate substance, but within man.’ But he downplays the importance of such claims, interpreting Kant as referring merely to ‘the legislative capacity of originative reason, and not [to] the sort of subjectivity that belongs to human persons.’[17] Kant repeats this notion on numerous occasions, such as in Kt9:21.19(225), where he appears to be hinting at a synthesis between systemt and systemp: ‘The concept of God is that of a being as the highest cause of world-beings and as a person.’ And Kt9:21.48(Su71: 125) says: ‘The concept of God is that of a personality of a thought-being, or ideal Being which reason creates for itself. Man is also a person, but yet which as sense-object belongs to the world.’ So a key difference between God and a human person is that only the latter has a physical body. Such comments are likely to mislead us unless we keep in mind that ‘reason’ for Kant refers not to a property possessed by each individual, but to a transcendent power or reality that all persons participate in and should submit to. This seems to be what Webb has in mind [We26:192] when he interprets such claims to mean that ‘[i]n recognizing the Law we find ourselves in God’s presence; ... for the Law itself is the revelation of his Personality.’ From this new standpoint, ‘the Moral Law’ just is ‘the Presence of God ... immediately revealed’ [199], ‘a Presence [that is] “closer to us than breathing and nearer than hands and feet”’ [200].
Greene agrees that ‘Kant’s thought tended always to conceive of God in terms of the basic concept of personality’, rather than that of the (far more static) ‘Unconditioned’ or ‘Absolute’ [Gr34:lxviii]. Yet England, after noting in En29:192n that ‘Kant frequently describes God as a person’ in Kt9, complains that ‘Kant ... had a very imperfect notion of what was implied in the notion of personality’—the main problem being that Kant’s view seems too ‘static’. This is hardly fair to Kant, for he describes God dynamically as a ‘living’ substance who, like human beings, ‘is capable of rights’ [Kt9:22.48(210)]. Personality in the human sense (e.g., involving duties as well as rights) ‘cannot be attributed to the Deity’; for God’s personality is ‘omnipotent’, ‘omniscient’, and ‘omnibenevolent’. Kant’s earlier claim in Kt8:28(23) that ‘the moral law ... is personality itself’, so that a human being’s ‘predisposition to personality is the capacity for respect for the moral law’ [27(22-3)], need not be regarded as static, provided we associate the moral law with the living voice of conscience within us (e.g., the ‘holy Ghost’ [22.60(217)]), rather than taking it as a fixed logical principle.
The ‘personal’ in itself is a nonreflective mode of being; it is the ‘I’ that gives rise to all reflective perspectives. As such, we could regard the third stage of any judicial system as adopting the ‘personal perspective’—i.e., the perspective whose task is to determine the necessary conditions (principles) that govern personal experience. Two such conditions would be that personality is inherently spiritual, yet manifested in a material form. Thus, ‘God is a spirit’ [Kt9: 22.58(215)], and this divine person ‘is immanent in the human spirit’ through the moral law,[18] yet also present in nature [22.61-2, e.a.; s.a. 22.57(215)]: ‘What is God? —He is the unique being, unconditionally commanding in the moral-practical relation (i.e., according to the categorical imperative), exercising all power over nature. This is already in its concept a unique [being]: ... the very thought of him is at the same time belief in him and in his personality.’
Kant goes so far as to regard the moral imperative as the voice of God in the human soul:[19] ‘The categorical imperative ... leads directly to God, yes, serves as a pledge of His reality’; ‘the virtuous individual experiences directly, in the categorical imperative, the voice of God and ... apprehends Him, with the certainty of a personal faith, as a transcendental reality’; for ‘in morally-practical reason and in the categorical imperative God reveals himself.’[20] Schrader appeals to the perspectival character of Kant’s System in order to explain why this does not contradict systemp’s view of the moral law as independent from all external determination (including God’s) [Sc51a:239-40]: ‘It is from the standpoint of religion that the moral law is to be regarded as the “voice of God.” The passages from [Kt9] in which Kant makes such assertions are perfectly consistent with his critical position.’
Interestingly, Kant refers to ‘instinct’ in Kt63:111 as ‘that voice of God which is obeyed by all animals.’ He goes on [112] to suggest that the story of Adam and Eve is the story of how human beings first came to ‘do violence to the voice of nature’—here equivalent to the ‘voice of God’ in instinct—through ‘the first attempt at free choice’.[21] This account of reason’s ‘birth’ suggests that our free reason is the very thing that puts up a barrier between us and God, which in turn implies reason must in some sense ‘die’ or come to its final resting point before God’s voice becomes fully audible to us again. We shall return to this provocative suggestion at the close of this chapter, though a detailed treatment of this theme will be given only in KSP4.
Kant’s definitions and descriptions of God in Kt9 consistently link God to practical reason. The claim that ‘[m]oral-practical reason ... leads to the concept of God’ [22.116(200)] seems quite consistent with the moral argument that plays an integral part in systemp. Likewise, the notion that God is ‘a being which has only rights and no duties’ [22.120(203); s.a. 21.9-11(218-9); 22.48-9(210);], who is ‘obligating’ but ‘never obligated’ [22.127(207); s.a. 22.124 (205)] holds no surprises. That God ‘has unrestricted power over nature and freedom under laws of reason’ does seem, however, to be going further.[22] Clearly Kant sees God as an active force in the world. But what kind of force? Whatever else this force may be [see XII.3], it is personal, for as we have seen, Kant repeatedly insists on viewing God as a ‘person’ [e.g., 22.119-20 (102-3)]. Sometimes he borrows biblical imagery to describe this relationship: ‘In ... the idea of God as a moral being, we live, and move and have our being’ [22.118(201); s.a. 22.55(214); cf. Acts 17:28]. But at its most extreme, Kant’s tendency to connect God with practical reason appears to lead him to identify the two: ‘The concept of God ... is not a hypothetical thing but pure practical reason itself in its personality’ [22.118(201-2)]. ‘There is a God for there is a categorical imperative’ [22.106(Su71:120); cf. 104-5].
Some interpreters have taken such claims at face value, concluding that Kant’s God, especially in Kt9, is indeed identical to reason. Such an interpretation has an element of truth in it: the foregoing quotes demonstrate that Kant does regard God as immanent in the web of a priori conditions that reason uses to bring true knowledge, good action, and beautiful purposes into the grasp of human beings. Sometimes he refers to ‘the categorical imperative in me’ in close proximity to statements that allude to the meaning of his own first name: ‘Est deus in nobis’ (‘God is in us’, the Hebrew meaning of ‘Immanuel’) [22.129-30(209); s.a. 22.54(213)]. When Kant himself raises the issue of whether there is anything real that corresponds to our concept of God [22.117(201)]—that is, anything that would distinguish God from human reason or extend beyond the categorical imperative—he usually avoids any direct answer, calling this issue ‘problematic’; but he clarifies elsewhere that this being ‘is different from me’ even though I become aware of it only ‘in me’ [21.25(229)]. In some sense, we participate in the life of God whenever we use our rational capacities properly. Yet, to regard this intimate participation as a complete identification is to ignore Kant’s equally important emphasis on God’s transcendence [see V.1]. For, although Kant always insists that God abides by the moral law, he does not therefore believe God is subordinate to it; rather, ‘the categorical imperative is a command of God’ [22.128(208), e.a.]. That Kant does not intend in such comments to make an absolute identification is demonstrated further in AIV.4.
God may be present in our reason, but our reason is not coextensive with God’s nature. For God must also have some reality over and above the whole System of Perspectives. Despland accurately portrays these two aspects when he says [De73:146] ‘Kant’s moral theism secures a subjective interior approach to our thinking about God and secures a transcendent, religiously available God.’ Just as Copernicus derived his theory concerning the movements of the planets from the hypothesis that a motionless sun lies at the center of the astronomical system, so also Kant derives his theory concerning the meaning of human perspectives on truth, goodness, and beauty from the hypothesis that a real, transcendent God (the ultimate thing in itself, ‘outside myself’ [21.15(222); 21.22 (228)]) emits the pure (but unknowable) ‘light’ of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty from the suprarational, perspectiveless center of the philosophical System [see e.g., Kt65:47]. That Kant regards all this as happening ‘within us’ (i.e., in our immediate experience) prompts Weber (in his History of Philosophy) to claim even ‘the three Critiques culminate in absolute spiritualism’ [q.i. Ca02:257].
KSP1:V.1-4 demonstrated that Kant’s philosophical System begins with a special sort of ‘theoretical faith’ in the existence (or ‘reality’) of the thing in itself. We can now see that the System ends where it began, only now with a deep awareness that this faith can only be validated through what is usually called a religious experience.[23] A mystical experience is the ultimate way of validating the initial, theoretical faith required to enter the System; without such an experience, all theological reflection is groundless. Whereas in systemp Kant had argued that morality provides us with reasons for belief in God, ‘he now ... suggests that the moral experience itself may legitimately be regarded as an experience of the Divine.’[24] Or as Norburn puts it in No73:439, Kt9 tries to show ‘that our awareness of God goes along with, not is merely postulated by, our awareness of the moral law.’
This expression of the consciousness of moral obligation as an immediate consciousness of God seems to be operating as a new way of proving God’s existence.[25] As such, Adickes [Ad20] interprets it as a repudiation of the moral proof given in the fourth stage of systemp—a view often echoed uncritically.[26] Although Kemp Smith agrees with Adickes, stating that in Kt9 Kant ‘acknowledges the inadequacy of his professedly practical, but really theoretical, proof of God’s existence, advocating in its place a proof of a more consistently moral character’ [Ke23:610], he later admits that Kant ‘nowhere, in explicit terms, avows this change of standpoint’ [638; cf. Wo70:10-3]. The former comment not only reads theoretical motives into Kant’s moral argument that simply are not there,[27] it also fails to take account of the fact that the argument in Kt9 is not essentially moral, but judicial, if not existential. As Schrader explains, Adickes supports his position with three points: ‘(1) that Kant failed to restate [‘the moral argument in the Opus Postumum’]; (2) that he declared that no proof of God’s existence can be offered; (3) that he stated that God is directly and immediately revealed in the categorical imperative’ [Sc51a:235]. Let us take a closer look at each of these points in turn.
The first point is merely negative and could just as well indicate ‘that Kant was quite satisfied with the formulations of the argument which he already had’ [Wa72:161]. This alternative is supported by the otherwise grossly inconsistent fact that Kant continues to support the general idea of a moral proof [see e.g., Kt9:22.60(217); 22.121(203)], regarding ‘the knowledge of all duties as divine commands’ as having ‘the same force as if a real world-judge were assumed’ [22.125(206)]. That he does not restate the details of the proof does not mean he no longer accepts it,[28] but only that what is appropriate for practical critique may be irrelevant for the judicial metaphysics of Kt9. The second point is likewise easily rebutted by anyone who is sensitive to Kant’s use of the principle of perspective. Kt9’s rejection of theological proofs ‘is entirely consonant with Kant’s Critical position, wherein he does not regard the moral argument as a theoretical proof’ [Wa72:161; s.a. Sc51a:236-40]. Kant apparently assumes the reader is familiar enough with his System of Perspectives to know he is referring only to the inadequacy of all theoretical proofs. When the first two points are accounted for perspectivally, the third point loses its problematic character: an immediate apprehension of God is not a problem as long as we remember that it is valid only from the standpoint of judicial metaphysics [see X.3].
Against Adickes’ third point, Schrader argues that certain passages in Kt9 ‘would seem to make it impossible to conclude that Kant had come to accept a personal subjective faith in God based upon a direct revelation in the categorical imperative’ [Sc51a:237]. The passage he quotes, however, states that the ideas of freedom and God ‘cannot be exhibited and proven directly (immediately) but only indirectly through a mediating principle: ... namely, in the human, moral/ practical reason’ [Kt9:21.30]. This simply means the immediate experience of God through practical reason cannot serve as a direct theoretical proof; Kant is not here denying or contradicting his claims elsewhere in Kt9 that our consciousness of God is direct and immediate.[29] Thus Adickes’ third point is valid, but provides no evidence that Kant intends to repudiate the moral argument proposed in systemp. Because of their lack of attention to the principle of perspective, the positions represented by Adickes and Schrader both fail to take account of the crucial fact that the argument in systemp is significantly different from that in Kt9: the former argues for the need to postulate God in order to make sense out of our morality; the latter argues that God is, in fact, present in our immediate experience. There is therefore no good reason to regard the two arguments as mutually exclusive; both can be accepted, provided we distinguish clearly between their respective standpoints.
The distinctive character of Kant’s argument in Kt9 can be brought out still further by examining its epistemological status. I shall do this in more detail in XII.3 when considering Kant’s claims regarding the mysterious substance that underlies and unifies our immediate experience of nature. At this point a few brief suggestions will suffice. Copleston uses the phrase ‘religious a priori’ to describe ‘the idea that man is by nature oriented to God or open to the Transcendent’.[30] Kant would reject such a claim, not because he denies our theocentric orientation—he does not [see I.3]—but because it is not part of our nature in the same way the synthetic a priori conditions for knowledge are. Unlike space, time, and causality, as well as freedom and the moral law, we do not find ‘God’ in our reason as a constituent element, epistemologically prior to all experience; rather, we make it a part of our nature, in response to and in proportion with our encounter with transcendent reality. That is, our openness to God is ‘by nature’ in a very different way: it is an a posteriori response,[31] whereby we impose the concept of the transcendent (analytically) onto our experience. The analyticity of this imposition explains why Kant says in Kt9:21.153(Su71:133): ‘It is absurd to ask whether there is a God.’ To ask such a question, from Kt9’s existential standpoint, is tantamount to asking: ‘Do I exist?’ For a basic ‘self-perceiving’ (Selbstanschauung—i.e., ‘making oneself the object of one’s own perception’) lies at the root of our awareness of God. Describing its status as analytic yet a posteriori can help us appreciate why Kant speaks of it in such a paradoxical way [see AIV.4]. Although he does not express his position so clearly, he does hint at it on several occasions, as when he refers in Kt9:22.442(163) to our ‘self-intuition’ as both analytic and synthetic [s.a. 465(131)].
Does Kant’s appeal to a direct experience of God merely take us back to the preKantian practice of philosophers calling on God to fill the ‘gaps’ they could not fill in with empirical evidence or rational proof? No. The difference between Kant’s appeal to God and the typical ‘God of the gaps’ approach is that the latter treats God as an element in the system, so that our knowledge of God is regarded as absolutely certain, whereas Kant appeals to a person’s experience of God, interpreted through an act of faith, as a paradoxical awareness of the presence of transcendence within the world—a purely subjective validation of a System that begins and ends with a recognition of objective ignorance of the transcendent.[32] To some, this may be an inadequate, intellectually dissatisfying way to conclude such an impressive philosophical System. But to Kant it is the only way to be philosophical without letting our philosophy rob us of what is most authentically human. As Norburn puts it in No73:442, ‘when we have acquired the humility to accept [the] truth [that ‘our situation’ is ‘indefensibly human’], then all our thinking, says Kant, centers our minds upon the idea of God. Can we ask for more?’
3. The World: Matter’s Living Force as Philosophy’s Technical End
The main focus of Kant’s attention in the sections of Kt9 dealing with the idea of the world (i.e., with the transitions between physics, Kt1, and Kt3) is on the philosophical implications of the phenomenon we experience as heat. In keeping with a common conviction among physicists of his day, Kant believed this and other phenomena require the postulation of a hidden substance, called ‘caloric’ or ‘ether’[33]—i.e., ‘a matter for which all bodies are permeable, but which is itself expansive’ [Kt9:22.193(53)]. He regards ‘caloric’ as the ‘presupposition’ that ‘an internally moving matter’ exists and fills ‘the whole of cosmic space’.[34] This ‘inward’ undulation or ‘vibration’ does not as such expand the material object, but vibrates ‘in the space which it occupies’ [22.142(48)]. Kant maintains that ‘the function of its activity is not [merely to generate] warmth’; instead, ‘heat may only be one particular effect of its moving forces’ [21.228-9(76); s.a. 21.584-5(92), 21.602(96)]. The resulting ‘idea of the whole of moving forces ... is the basis of ... matter’ [21.581(90)]; we experience it as ‘a sense-object’ [e.g., 21.582(91)]. Kant sees this universal and never-ending movement at the inner core of all matter as leading to ‘the concept of an animated matter’ [21.184(59)]. That is, ‘the totality of our world’, taken as itself ‘an organic body’, can be thought of as being alive![35]
Although Kant unfortunately does not explicitly connect the basic energy of nature with his other concerns in Kt9, he does provide us with enough hints to develop a coherent reconstruction. For example, he poses the basic problem of this aspect of his Final Transition project as follows [Kt9:22.120(203)]: ‘There is a God in the soul of man. The question is whether he is also in nature.’ That Kant wants to encourage an affirmative answer to this question seems beyond reasonable doubt, given the weight of textual evidence. In this passage, after reminding us that ‘God and the world contain the totality of existence’ [22.124(205)], Kant draws an explicit analogy between God and ‘the ether’: ‘God regarded as a natural being is [also] a hypothetical being, assumed for the explanation of appearances’ [22.126(206)]. Indeed, by taking such tantalizing hints seriously and regarding cosmotheology (God-in-the-world) as a key expression of Kt9’s aim [see 21.17(224)], we can interpret Kant’s long and hard focus on the topic of ether/caloric as an expression of his belief that this ‘living force’ [e.g., 22.142(48)] is a real manifestation of God’s fiery presence in the natural world.
Not just the matter that constitutes the bodies of plants and animals [Kt9: 22.210(3)], but all matter is, in this metaphorical sense, alive. Kant thus portrays the hidden, internal side of matter as endlessly vibrating in ways that do not expand the space it fills in the visible world, but which alone explains how heat can come about. ‘These pulsations constitute a living force’.[36] Despite appearances to the contrary, this view does not require Kant to change or reject any of his Critical doctrines; rather, it merely indicates Kt9’s change of standpoint. For just as the thing in itself is unknowable in systemt, so also we are ‘incapable of knowing [the ether] and its weight by any experience’ [21:387-8(13)]; despite the crucial role they play in the transition, both ether and caloric are ‘imponderable’ (i.e., they lack density).
Kant shows special interest in the force of gravity, because (unlike ordinary forces that act externally to objects in order to propel them into motion) gravity ‘acts upon the inside of matter immediately’ [Kt9:21.308(24)]. Likewise, to account for our ‘sensation of warmth’, Kant posits at one point a sixth sense, ‘an inward one’, in contrast to the ‘five outer senses’ [22.343 [112]). Given Kant’s insistence that ‘a highest—namely, originally independent—understanding’ underlies the ‘one universal [matter]’ [21.183(60)], we are justified in regarding such comments as yet further evidence of Kant’s interest in highlighting the natural basis of God’s immediate presence. Indeed, the foregoing quote is followed by a single word that ends a section: ‘agitatio.’ This seems to be Kant’s shorthand way of indicating his intention to portray God as underlying the material world as its agitating force, a primal fire that shakes up and warms the entire universe. As Sullivan puts it, Kant regards ‘phlogiston, the principle of fire’ as ‘[t]he most common example’ of a phenomenon that requires us to posit God as ‘a hypothetical being’ in order to explain its occurrence [Su71:127].
Physics, it seems, is revealing to us at its very root the same ‘Immanuel’ (‘God in us’) we find at the foundation of true religion: ‘The primum movens is not locomotive but rather internal’ [Kt9:22.200(55)], for ‘this matter is ... to be assumed as the prime mover ..., subjectively’ [21.553(82)]. Since ‘intention’ cannot be a property of matter, Kant reasons, we must suppose an immaterial basis for the unifying force that makes organisms what they are—what some would call ‘a world-soul’, though this can never be demonstrated [22.548(85); cf. 22.100(197)]. Indeed, Kant warns on a number of occasions that he is not supporting the notion of a ‘world-soul’ [e.g., 21.18-9(224-5); 21.92(252]; rather, his view is that our ‘[m]oral-practical reason is one of the moving forces of nature and of all sense-objects.’ [22.105(199)]. That he has an analogical connection in mind here is suggested in Kt9:21.153: ‘To say absolutely that a God is ... is analogous with the propositions that space is and time is. All these objects of knowledge are mere products of our own self-made representations (ideas) among which that of God is the uppermost.’ This analogy confirms the view of God proposed in Figure V.3, whereby God is viewed as being immanent (omnipresent) to our moral reason in the same way space and time are to our experience of the phenomenal world. Kant sometimes expresses this so forcefully that he seems almost to be forgetting its analogical status [Ad20: 827(We26:199)]: ‘The idea of that which the human Reason itself makes of the universe is the active representation of God, not as the substance of a separate personality outside of me, but as the thought of a personality within me’. Elsewhere Kant expresses this ‘panentheism’ even more explicitly: ‘space is the phenomenon of the divine omnipresence.’[37]
Kant’s reason for referring in a number of Kt9 passages to Spinoza’s view that we ‘intuit all things [Sache] ... in God’ [e.g., 21.50-1(241-2); s.a. Kt19: 410] is not easy to discern. These jottings may simply be reminders of a position he intends to refute later on. Such an interpretation could find backing from Hamann’s report that Kant ‘had never properly studied Spinoza’ [Ba03: xxxv] and that ‘Kant could never make anything of Spinoza, though he had many long conversations on the subject with his intimate friend Kraus.’ Yet I believe there is more to such references than this. For Spinoza’s formula expresses in a nutshell a view Kant himself seems to be elaborating throughout Kt9 and serves as a significant means of expressing the culminating step of Kt9’s tantalizing task: to unite together the two most diverse human ideas: God and the world. For by ‘things’ Kant is referring not to the abstract epistemological construct of the thing in itself (Ding an sich), but to the manifold phenomena (Sache) we actually experience in the world. Kant’s point, then, seems to be that Spinoza provides us with a means of conceiving how the knowing subject unites God and the world in every act of intuition.
Here again we have met the sort of paradox that typifies all the transitions, with their character as the synthesis of a pair of opposites: the living forces of matter are alive (‘in God’), even though matter as we know it (as ‘all things’) is dead [see e.g., Kt9:475(40)]. Let us therefore examine the epistemological status of Kant’s claims regarding the mysterious substance that underlies and unifies the continuum we experience as space-time.[38] As I have argued in KSP1:IV.3-4 and elsewhere, one of Kant’s chief shortcomings was to limit his epistemological framework to three basic types of knowledge instead of recognizing the role of the analytic a posteriori as the proper status of those elements in his System that must be taken on faith. In an early draft for a Preface to Kt9 [21.524(36)] Kant confesses his love of architectonic in terms that reveal why he remained blind to the power of the analytic a posteriori:
As far as philosophy is concerned it is my plan—and lies ... in my natural vocation—to remain within the boundaries of what is knowable a priori: to survey, where possible, its field, and to present it as a circle (orbis), simple and unitary, that is, as a system prescribed by reason, not one conceived arbitrarily.
Here Kant reveals his absolute bias for the a priori—a bias that may be regarded as the single most important reason Kant’s goal remains, as we saw in Chapter XI, a tantalizing ideal that he is unable to grasp. For he has rightly identified the status of physics as an empirical science: its specific knowledge-claims must be synthetic and a posteriori. He has also rightly identified his own philosophical foundations for physics (established in Kt1-Kt3) as providing synthetic a priori principles for science. He is even right to recognize that a gap still remains between the empirical status of physics and the foundations provided in Kt3. He goes wrong only by insisting that the gap he is searching for must be filled by something a priori.
Kant’s treatment of this problem in Kt9 shows he is aware of the paradoxical nature of his search: he is looking for something that could be a priori and yet empirical at the same time. As he points out at several points, ‘the transition is a descent’ from a priori principles to the empirical [e.g., Kt9:21.476(40); s.a. 21.525(36-7)]. Kant seems well aware that he is on to something crucial to the unity and completeness of his philosophical System; but how to describe the status of this tantalizing transition repeatedly alludes his grasp.[39] For the remainder of this section I shall argue that his search for an appropriate description for all the transitions, but especially for the vital role played by ether/caloric, can be satisfied by classifying them as analytic a posteriori.
Despite his repeated attempts to force it into his favorite, transcendental (synthetic a priori) mold, Kant elsewhere leaves no doubt as to the analytic status of his ether proof.[40] For example, he states in Kt9:21.226(74) that its principle—the principle of ‘full space’, the opposite of the Newtonian concept of ‘empty space’ [21.223-4(72-3)]—is inferred ‘according to the principle of identity’ from the impossibility of empty space [s.a. 21.228-9(75-6)]. Moreover, he comes right out and calls it analytic in passages such as Kt9:21.233 (78): ‘the universally distributed caloric ... is the basis for the system of moving forces which emerges analytically, from concepts—that is, according to the rule of identity—from the principle of agreement with the possibility of experience in general.’ By referring to ‘the possibility of experience in general’ he intends, no doubt, to suggest an a priori (transcendental) origin for the ether principle. Yet he also wants to regard it as empirical—wherein, he admits, ‘appears to lie a contradiction’ [e.g., 21.230(77); s.a. 21.244(79)]. Once again, he could have resolved (or at least, found a valid epistemological status to clarify) the paradoxical character of this ultimate principle by fully embracing its purely conceptual starting-point as analytic, but treating it as a regulative hypothesis that we impose onto our experience of the world, a posteriori. This would have given him a conceptual handle for describing how the concept of ether/caloric can at first be ‘a mere thought-object’ (an analytic relation between concepts), yet can come to be experienced as a real sense-object (an a posteriori relation between intuitions).[41]
The impasse in Kant’s reasoning is caused by his unquestioned assumption that the concept of ether/caloric must be a priori in order to fulfill a significant philosophical function. Thus when he portrays the caloric essence of all matter as ‘an idea that emerge[s] from reason’ [Kt9:22.551-2(87)], he assumes this must make it a priori, even though he is quick to point out the paradoxical fact that it is also ‘to be regarded altogether as an object of experience (given).’ ‘Caloric is’, as he puts it in Kt9:21.584(91), ‘a categorically given material.’ Once we recognize its emergence from reason as analytic (contained within the categories), we are set free to regard its material givenness as an a posteriori characteristic. Along these lines Kant here admits that the concept of caloric can have a ‘hypothetical’ use whenever we use it ‘to explain certain phenomena’. (Recall that Kant’s hypothetical perspective corresponds to the analytic a posteriori stage in my reconstructed version of Kant’s architectonic, as depicted in Figure III.4.) Although the ether proof makes use of the concept of ‘possible experience’, as do all ordinary transcendental arguments, there is an important difference that demands a new epistemological status: the ether proofs are concerned not with the form (as ‘merely thought’), but with the content of possible experience [22.580(90)]—a point again suggesting they are a posteriori.
Kant says in Kt9:22.241(57) that the four principles of transition are ‘derived analytically from the mere concept of physics.’ Earlier in the same sentence he also says the transition is ‘a priori’. But if the transition were both analytic and a priori, then it would be nothing but a merely logical operation. What Kant has in mind, however, seems to be much more subtle—something akin to logic, but with deeper implications for the way we actually experience the world; he simply has no access to terminology that enables him to express such a quasi-logical status. The subtlety comes to the fore in the paradoxical note that appears at the end of the same paragraph: ‘Regulative principles which are also constitutive.’ Being analytic enables a principle to regulate our knowledge conceptually; in order also to be constitutive of our experience, it would need to be a posteriori, not a priori.
Kant’s treatment of the nature of organisms in Kt9 provides yet another example of his groping towards the concept of analytic a posteriority. ‘The idea of organic bodies’, he claims, can be established a priori, though only ‘indirectly’, through ‘the concept of a real whole’; yet ‘[r]egarded directly’, organisms ‘can be known only empirically’ [Kt9:21.213(66); s.a. 22.356(115)]. He goes on to explain that we learn what an organism is from our (a posteriori) consciousness of ourselves as organizing (rational, architectonic) beings, then we classify the objects we have organized according to the conceptual structures we impose upon our experience. He calls these structures ‘a priori’; but if the focus is on their conceptual status, he should have called them ‘analytic’.
The analytic a posteriori status of Kt9’s transitions is even more clear in an earlier passage, where Kant calls the four categorial forms of transition ‘a priori laws ... drawn, not from the elements of physics [which would be synthetic] ... but from concepts (to which we subordinate the elements of physics)’ [21.183(59)]. To draw a law directly from concepts is an analytic procedure; to subordinate elements of physics to such a concept can have only a posteriori validity. This, as I have argued more fully in Pa87d, is essentially what takes place every time we name something. When Kant refers to his Transition project as ‘the general-physiological’ link with ‘a priori conceivability’ [22.189 (51); s.a. 22.191(52)], we should read him as naming a process that confers an analytic a posteriori status on the Transition—a status he assumes without argument to be a priori. Likewise, his claim that caloric ‘is determined for experience’ [21.603(96)] can now be regarded as epistemologically equivalent to the way naming an infant establishes a certain concept to determine a person’s experience analytically, yet in an entirely a posteriori fashion. The difference is that this creative function is now expanded to cover the whole of our experience [22.554(89)]: ‘Caloric is actual, because the concept of it ... makes possible the whole of experience.’ As such, Kant’s doctrine of caloric/ether functions as the analytic a posteriori equivalent of what Kant elsewhere calls ‘substance’.
Kant makes numerous direct comparisons between the God-hypothesis and the ether-hypothesis [see e.g., Kt9:22.128-9(208-9)]. Not only are both regarded as ‘substances’ with a necessarily hypothetical status; both must also refer only to singular realities (one God and one world). We should not be surprised, therefore, to find that Kant has just as much difficulty in assigning an epistemological status to the former as to the latter. The assertion of God’s existence, he tells us, ‘is neither an analytic nor a synthetic proposition’ [22.128 (208)]. The reason Kant is forced to make such vague and inconclusive statements, I believe, is that he never considers the possibility that the status of propositions such as ‘God exists’ is actually analytic a posteriori.
4. The Ideal Human: Christ as Philosophy’s Highest Religious End
Like it or not, interpreters must recognize that the mysterious quality of Kt9 comes not so much from its disorderly, unfinished form—though this does add confusion to the mystery—as to the essentially mystical aim Kant has in view: to describe the one in the many. Along these lines, even Förster acknowledges at one point that some of Kant’s theories are related, at least indirectly, to ‘cabalistic ideas’ [Fö93:277, n.105; see Kt9:22.421(184)]. Those who follow the common practice of portraying Kant as a philosopher who synthesized rationalism and empiricism [cf. KSP1:355,383] rarely take into consideration that such a synthesis can be effected only by subsuming both of these extremes under a third term. We are now in a position to suggest that the Critical mysticism that has been gradually em